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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: blogdiva AT culturekitchen.com
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] NetArt and Copyright: A response to Zanni
  • Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:32:23 -0500 (EST)


Carlo wrote:
<i>In truth I find CreativeCommons set of
licenses very interesting ("Choose License"
tool is very helpful) but not so well
applicable to an art piece... but of course..
I'm here to learn and to know more about this
subject.</i>

Anybody that goes to potatoland will get how
Napier understand data. Data on the web is
nothing unless you have something to
interpret it. It is just electrical currents
that you can unravel in the way the W3C has
agreed a browser should, the way Microsoft
insists it should work or however you can get
away coding it yourself (as in <b>The
Shredder</b>). In effect, anything digital is
really up for grabs --whether you put it on
the web, on a cd or dvd. It does not matter.
There is always some hacker with a new trick
that can be at the ready to snif and swipe
either your content or your code.

Napier went on to work on potatoland right
after the Mattel/Distorted Barbie incident.
This experience left him keenly aware that on
the net anything goes. So you see how a lot
of his work is almost impossible to copyright
---if what we are talking here is content.
Why every instance of a piece like
<b>Riot</b>, for example, is unique and
irreproducible. That means that anybody that
goes to pototaland right now can walk away
with a one-of-a-kind Mark Napier. They can
shred a website or make a riot with a couple
of them, take screenshots, blow them up or
make nice archival prints with them, frame
them and VOILA! a one-of-a-kind work of art
by Mark Napier.

Now notice I said one-of-a-kind but not
authentic. I'll get to that in a minute.

As I said, Napier was very aware of this.
This was part of the design of the work and
we decided to keep any mention of copyright
off the website because at the time the site
was created there was no CC-licensing. We
have discussed this licensing issue many
times and he is still out on the matter
because there is another issue at hand, the
issue of what I am going to call at the
moment "collaborative interactivity" because
for 7 years now we've been searching for the
right term and still have not found it.

In collaborative interactivity the user is an
intrinsic part of the artwork. The artwork
does not exist unless someone uses the
software or interacts with the interface.
Napier's pieces are inspired partly from
gaming and from all those years of creating
software programs for the banking industry.
As a commercial coder he has a knack for
usability. But his work is also informed by
my background in post-structuralist theory.
When working the QA of his pieces and the
issues of usability, I have always used
Maurice Blanchot as an inspiration and I am
going to paraphrase one of his ideas on
writing: A book that has never been read is a
book that has yet to be written. This idea of
creativity has been fundamental in the
development of the interfaces for Napier's
work.

In most of Napier's earlier work the user
becomes the single most important aspect of
the artwork. Without users there would be no
<b>c-Bots</b> and in that sense Carlo is
correct to say that it becomes inconceivable
to think that one could create a fair
copyright license for a piece like that. I
mean, it is not Mark Napier who created the
end results, it was the user. It would seem
fair to say that in a piece like
<b>net.flag</b>, each user that wanted to
print the screen and print their flag and/or
flags would just go ahead and do it. At the
moment that piece, even though it is part of
the Guggenheim and by virtue of the contract
signed copyrighted by them, they cannot
really stop anybody from creating their own
printed gallery of net.flags.

A lot of people have viewed this 'anything
goes' attitude about net art as the main
problem with its viability as a commodity. If
is it digital it will be easily reproducible.
Well, yes but we can see especially with the
music industry that the more companies try to
close down a digital product (think of the
music and movie industries) the more hackers
out there will find a way to crack the code.
So what would make it viable? Authenticity.

If a digital piece has been authenticated by
the artist, that would make it more valuable
than anything considered one-of-a-kind. When
working out the details of how <b>The Waiting
Room</b> was going to be sold, several ideas
were tossed around from watermarks to
encryption to password keys. Napier settled
for the idea of a "deed". If the owners of
the piece want to make multiple copies of the
work, that's up to them. What is of value to
them is the fact that their CD and/or
components have been authenticated with a
deed of their share of the work (whichever
numbers they bought out of the 50 in the
edition). This may seem lamely
untechnological but think about it if it
where applied to the music industry.

Once upon a time LPs were collected for their
covers, particularly if they were part of a
special edition. Many music enthusiasts saw
the advent of tapes and then CDs as the death
of the fantastic pop-art easily available on
LPs. What difference is there between an LP a
cassette tape or a cd? The CD is easy to
reproduce point by point in quality and even
easier to distribute (thanks to MP3s and the
web) whereas it was not so with LPs or
cassettes. Does this mean people never used
to make copies of LPs or cassettes? Of course
not and we know that and the record industry
knows that. They've always known that songs
are easily reproducible --if not we would not
have muzak. But the industry is caught up on
volume because quantity and not quality is
not what they are after. Still the model is
bound for extinction.

In a world where almost anything is
reproducible you've got to work with that and
say, how am I going to make this worth
people's while? Good art, good music, good
movies? Yes, perhaps, maybe. Still, if you
can authenticate the work, if you can make it
extra special because you are giving the
buyer something that only they have access
to, that is where the market will go. It's
all about scarcity. So you turn buyers into
collectors making their version of an album,
a movie or an artwork unique. Then the
reproducibility of a digital work of art,
song or software are not going to be an issue
anymore. Authenticity is what would make it
valuable.

This is not new to the market --it has always
been the case with art and antiques. What
will be interesting to see is how this is how
this is going to be extended to the market --
given that it is already being tested with
DVD movies. There's a whole "extras"
documentary industry cropping around them.

So to summarize, when it comes to art
displayed on the web, open licenses may be
helpful in explaining what people might want
to do with what they see and/or create with
the works (like copying and displaying
at home). When it comes to selling art
though, the issue is not so much whether the
work is reproducible or not but whether it
can be authenticated. That to me is what
makes these days any digital work worth
buying and collecting, whether it is a DVD,
MP3, Perl Script or Java Applet.

Best,
Liza




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